Elizabeth Warren: Jerome Powell has the same attitude as the Fed going into the 2008 crash

On Tuesday, following the remarks of Trump’s Federal Reserve Chair nominee Jerome Powell, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told Yahoo Finance that Powell’s testimony reminded her of the run up to the financial crisis.

“Jerome Powell talked about how he wanted to roll back regulations,” Warren told Yahoo Finance on the Final Round. But, Warren said, when he was asked whether there was a single area where the Fed could stand to exert tighter restrictions, he said no.

“It was exactly that attitude at the Fed in the run up in the crash in 2008,” she said. “The Fed had a lot of tools they could have intervened, but they sat there on their hands and said, ‘Let the market go forward.’”

Jerome Powell greets Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) before testifying to the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee on his nomination to become chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve in Washington, U.S., November 28, 2017. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

The question that prompted Warren’s ire towards the prospective Fed chair was whether she was concerned about hundreds of millions of ordinary consumers signing up for accounts to buy bitcoin.

“I’m worried about consumers getting hurt,” she said. The cryptocurrency has a history of extreme volatility, but has been on a tear of late, approaching $10,000 per bitcoin.

“It’s American families that end up paying the price when any regulator says we’re more interested in Wall Street,” said Warren. “What I think is that we need a Fed that is engaged in watching where risk builds up in the system. That’s the Fed’s job — that’s not the job of American families.”